The bridge, p.27
The Bridge, page 27
He tried the phone one last time. He went through to see Stewart; he was sleeping quietly, and rolled over when he looked in, away from the hall light’s glow. He wrote him a note and left it by the alarm clock. He took up his old biking jacket and the monogrammed scarf and let himself out of the flat.
Getting out of town took a while. There had been a shower; the streets were wet. He was playing Steeltown by Big Country as he edged the Jaguar through the traffic; it seemed appropriate, in Carnegie’s birthplace. He still felt fine. He knew he ought not to be driving, and he dreaded to think what he’d register on a breathlyser, but one - undrunk - part of him was watching and evaluating his driving; and he’d do, he’d get by, providing his concentration didn’t slip and he wasn’t unlucky. He wouldn’t do it again, he told himself as he at last found a clear stretch of road, heading for the motorway. Just this time, because it is important after all.
And I’ll be very careful.
It was dual carriageway here; he let the car leap forward, grinning as his back pressed into the seat. ‘Oh I just love to hear that engine snarl,’ he murmured to himself. He ejected the Big Country tape from the Nakamichi, frowning at himself for exceeding the speed limit. He let the car’s nose drop again, slowed.
Something not too raucous and adrenalin-encouraging for the approach and traverse of the great grey bridge. Bridge Over Troubled Water? he thought to himself, grinning. Haven’t had that in the car for yonks, Jimmy. He had Lone Justice, and Los Lobos’ How Will the Wolf Survive? on the other side of the tape; he picked it up, glanced at it as he approached the motorway itself. No, he wanted the Texican boys right now, and he didn’t want to wait for it to spool back. Just have to be the Pogues then. Rum Sodomy & the Lash; fuck nice steady driving tunes. Nothing wrong with a bit of raucousness. Keeps you awake better. Just don’t try to keep pace with the music all the time. There we go ...
He joined the M90, heading south. The sky was dark blue above the patchy clouds. A very mild evening; hardly even cool. The road was still wet. He sang along to the Pogues and tried not to go too fast. He felt thirsty; there was usually a can of Coke or Irn Bru in the door pocket, but he’d forgotten to replace the last one. He was forgetting too much these days. He put his main lights on after a few people flashed him.
The motorway crested a hill between Inverkeithing and Rosyth, and he could see the road bridge’s aircraft lights; sudden white flashes on the spires of the two great towers. Shame, really; he’d preferred the old red lights. He pulled over into the nearside lane to let a Sierra past, and watched the tail-lights disappear, thinking, You wouldn’t get away with that normally, chum. He settled back in the seat, his fingers on the small steering wheel beating in time to the music. The road headed for a stepped cutting through the rocks which formed the small peninsula; the sign for North Queensferry flashed by. He might have gone down there, to stand under the rail bridge again, but there was no point in making this journey any longer than it had to be; that would be tempting fate, or irony at least.
What am I doing this for? he thought. Will this really make any difference? I hate people who drunk-drive; why the hell am I doing it? He thought about heading back, taking the road down to North Queensferry after all. There was a station there; he could park, take the train (in either direction) ... but he’d passed the last turn-off before the bridge. The hell with it. Maybe he’d stop on the far side, at Dalmeny; park there rather than risk this expensive paint job in the pre-Christmas Edinburgh rush. Come back for the damn thing in the morning and remember to set all the alarms.
The road cleared the cutting through the hills. He could see South Queensferry, the marina at Port Edgar, the VAT 69 sign of the distillery there, the lights of Hewlett Packard’s factory; and the rail bridge, dark in the evening’s last sky-reflected light. Behind it, more lights; the Hound Point oil terminal they’d had a sub-contract on, and, further away, the lights of Leith. The old rail bridge’s hollow metal bones looked the colour of dried blood.
You fucking beauty, he thought. What a gorgeous great device you are. So delicate from this distance, so massive and strong close-up. Elegance and grace; perfect form. A quality bridge; granite piers, the best ship-plate steel, and a never-ending paint job ...
He glanced back at the roadway of the bridge as it rose slowly to its gentle, suspended summit. The surface was a little damp, but nothing to worry about. No problems. He wasn’t going all that fast anyway, staying in the nearside lane, looking over at the rail bridge downstream. A light winked at the far end of the island under the rail bridge’s middle-section.
One day, though, even you’ll be gone. Nothing lasts. Maybe that’s what I want to tell her. Maybe I want to say, No, of course I don’t mind; you must go. I can’t grudge the man that; you’d have done the same for me and I would for you. Just a pity, that’s all. Go; we’ll all survive. Maybe some good -
He was aware of the truck in front pulling out suddenly. He looked round to see a car in front of him. It was stopped, abandoned in the nearside lane. He sucked his breath in, stamped on the brakes, tried to swerve; but it was too late.
There was an instant when his foot was jammed down as hard as it would go on the brake, and when he’d pulled the wheel over as far as it would go in one twist, and he knew there was nothing else he could do.
He would never know how long that instant was, only that he saw the car in front was an MG, and that there was nobody in it - a ripple of relief on a tsunami of fear - and that he was going to hit it, hard. He caught a glimpse of the number plate; VS something. Wasn’t that a west coast number? The octagonal MG sign on the boot of the broken-down car floated closer to the Jaguar’s mascotless snout as it dipped, dug in and started to skid all at once. He tried to go limp, to relax and just go with it, but with his foot jamming the brake to the floor that wasn’t possible. He thought, You foo-The customised white Jaguar, registration number 233 FS, smashed into the rear of the MG. The man driving the Jaguar was thrown forward and up as it somersaulted. The seat belt held but the small steering wheel came pistoning up to meet his chest like a circular sledgehammer.
Low rolling hills under a dark sky; the undersurface of the lowering, ruddy clouds seems to mirror the gentle contours of the land below. The air is thick and heavy; it smells of blood.
It is soggy underfoot, but not with water. Whatever great battle was fought here, over these hills that seem to stretch for ever, it drenched the land with blood. There are bodies everywhere, of every animal and every colour and race of human, and many others besides. I find the small dark man eventually, attending the corpses.
He is dressed in rags; we last met in ... Mocca? (Occam? Something like that), when he was beating the waves with his iron flail. Now it is bodies. Dead bodies; a hundred lashes each, if there’s anything left to lash. I watch him for a while.
He is calm, methodical, beating each body exactly one hundred times, before proceeding to the next one.
He shows no preference concerning species, sex, size or colour; he beats each with the same determined vigour; on the back if possible, but otherwise just as they lie. Only if they are fully armoured does he touch them, bending stiffly to pull back a visor or disconnect a chest-strap.
‘Hello,’ he says. I stand some distance away, in case he is under orders to whip everybody on the field, regardless. ‘Remember me?’ I ask him. He strokes his bloody lash.
‘Can’t say I do,’ he says. I tell him about the city by the sea. He shakes his head. ‘No, not me,’ he says. He digs into his filthy robes for a moment, then comes out with a small rectangle of card. He wipes it with one strip of his rags, then holds it out. I step forward warily. ‘Take it,’ he nods. ‘I was told to give it to you.
Here.’ He leans forward. I take the card, step back. It is a playing card; the three of diamonds.
‘What’s this for?’ I ask him. He just shrugs, wipes his flail-hand on one tattered sleeve.
‘Don’t know.’
‘Who gave it to you? How did they know-’
‘Is it really necessary to ask all these questions?’ he says, shaking his head. I am shamed.
‘I suppose not.’ I hold up the playing card. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome,’ he says. I had forgotten how soft his voice was. I turn to go, then look back at him.
‘Just one more thing.’ I nod at the bodies littering the ground like fallen leaves. ‘What happened here?
What happened to all these people?’
He shrugs. ‘They didn’t listen to their dreams,’ he says, then turns back to his task.
I set off again, for the distant line of light which fills the horizon like a streak of white gold.
I left the city in the dried sea basin and walked the railway track away from it, heading in the same direction as the Field Marshal’s train before it was attacked. There was no pursuit, but I heard the sound of distant gunfire coming from the city as I walked.
The landscape changed gradually to become less harsh. I found water and, after a while, fruit on trees.
The climate grew less bleak. I saw people sometimes, travelling alone like me, or in groups. I stayed away from them, and they avoided me. Once I found I could walk without danger, and find food and water, the dreams came every night.
It was always the same nameless man and the same city. The dreams came and went, repeating and repeating. I saw so much, but nothing clearly. Twice I think I almost had the man’s name. I started to believe that my dreams were the genuine reality, and woke each morning beneath a tree or in the lee of some rocks, fully expecting to wake into another existence, a different life; just a nice clean hospital bed would be a start ... but no. I was always here, on temperate downlands that eventually became a battlefield, and where I have just met the man with the flail. Still, there is light at the end of the horizon.
I head for that light. It looks like the edge of these dank clouds; a long lidded eye of gold. At the top of a hill I look back on the small, misshapen man. He is still there, whipping at some fallen warrior. Perhaps I ought to have lain down and let him lash me; could death be the only way I might awake from this terrible, enchanted sleep?
That would require faith. I do not believe in faith. I believe it exists but I do not believe it works. I don’t know what the rules are here; I can’t risk throwing everything away on a long shot.
I come to the place where the clouds end and the dark downs give way to a low cliff. Beyond, there is sand.
An unnatural place, I think, looking up at the edge of dark cloud. It is too distinct, too uniform, the boundary between the shadowy downs with their fallen armies of dead and the golden waste of sand too precisely defined. A hot breath from off the sand blows away the stale, thick smells of the battlefield. I have a bottle of water, and some fruit. My waiter’s jacket is thin, the Field Marshal’s old coat dirty. I still have the handkerchief, like a favour.
I jump from the last hill over the hot sand, down into the golden slope, ploughing and sliding towards the floor of the desert. The air is hot and dry, devoid of the corrupting odours of the rolling battlefield behind me, but full of another sort of death; its promise in the very dryness of that air moving above a place where there is no water, no food, no shade.
I start walking.
Once I thought I was dying. I had walked and crawled, finding no shade. Finally I fell down the slip face of a dune and knew I could not rise from there without water, without liquid, without something. The sun was a white hole in the sky so blue it had no colour. I waited for clouds to form, but none came.
Eventually dark, wide-winged birds appeared. They started to wheel above me, riding an unseen thermal; waiting. I watched them, through half-glued eyes. The birds flew in a great spiral over the desert, as though there was some immense, invisible bolt suspended over me, and they were just scraps of black silk stuck to its spiralled plane, moving slowly as that vast column turned.
Then I see another man appear at the top of the dune. He is tall and muscular and dressed in some savage’s light armour; his golden arms and legs are bare. He carries a huge sword, and a decorated helmet, which he holds in the crook of one arm. He looks transparent and unsubstantial, for all his bulk. I can see through his body: perhaps he is a ghost. The sword glitters in the sunlight, but dully. He sways as he stands there, not seeing me. He puts one hand shakily to his brown, then seems to talk to the helmet he holds. He half-walks, half-staggers down the slip face towards me, his booted feet and thickly muscled legs plunging through the baking sand. Still he does not appear to notice me. His hair is bleached by the sun; peeling skin covers his face and arms and legs. The sword drags in the sand behind him. He stops at my feet, staring into the distance, swaying. Has he come to kill me with that great sword? At least it might be quick.
He stands, still swaying, eyes fixed on the hazy distance. I would swear he is standing too close to me, too close to my feet; as though his own feet were somehow inside mine. I lie, waiting. He stands above, struggling to keep on his feet, one arm going out suddenly as he tries to balance himself. The helmet in the crook of his arm falls to the sand. The helmet’s decoration, a wolf’s head, cries out.
The warrior’s eyes turn up into his head, going white. He crumples, falling towards me. I close my eyes, ready to be crushed.
I feel nothing. I hear nothing, either; he does not fall onto the sand beside me, and when I open my eyes there is no trace of him or the helmet he dropped. I stare into the sky again, at the entwined double-spiral of circling birds that are death.
I used the last of my strength to peel open my coat and jacket and bare my chest to the invisible, turning bolt in the sky. I lay, spreadeagled, for some time; two of the birds landed near me. I did not stir.
One of them swiped at my hand with its hooked beak, then jumped back. I lay still, waiting.
When they came for my eyes I took them by their necks. Their blood was thick and salty, but like the taste of life to me.
I see the bridge. At first I am certain it is a hallucination. Then I believe it might be a mirage, something which looks like the bridge reflected in the air and - to my parched, obsessed eyes - taking on its form. I walk closer, through the heat and the slopes of clinging, flowing grains. I have the handkerchief over my head, shading me. The bridge shimmers in the distance, a long rough line of summits.
I come slowly closer to it throughout the day, resting only for a short while when the sun is at its height.
Sometimes I climb to the tops of the long dunes, to reassure myself it is there. I am within a couple of miles before my confused eyes admit the truth to me; the bridge is in ruins.
The main sections are largely intact, though damaged, but the linking sections, those spans, those little bridges within bridges, they have collapsed or been destroyed, and large parts of the section extremities have disappeared along with them. The bridge looks less like a succession of laterally stretched hexagons and more like a line of isolated octagons. Its feet still stand, its bones still rise, but its linking arms, its connections - they have gone.
I see no movement, no sudden glints of light. The wind sighs sand over the edges of dunes, but no sound comes from the tall ochre skeleton of the bridge. It stands, blanched and gaunt and jagged in the sand, slow golden waves lapping at its granite plinths and lower buildings.
I enter its shadow at last, gratefully. The burning wind moans between the towering girders. I find a staircase, start to climb. It is hot and I am thirsty again.
I recognise this. I know where I am.
Everywhere is deserted. I see no skeletons but I find no survivors. The train deck holds a few old carriages and locomotives, rusted to the rails they stand upon; finally part of the bridge. Sand has blown up even here, shading yellow-gold into the edges of the rails and points.
My old haunt, indeed. I find Dissy Pitton’s. It is a fallen place; the ropes which used to attach tables and chairs to ceiling have mostly been cut; the couches and seats and tables lie sprawled over the dusty floor like bodies from long ago. A few hang by one edge or corner; cripples among the dead. I walk to the Sea View Lounge.
I sat here once with Brooke. Right here. We looked out and he complained about the barrage balloons; then the planes flew past. The desert is bright under the high sun.
Dr Joyce’s office; not his. I do not recognise any of this furniture, but then he was always moving. The blinds, blowing in and out gently behind the broken windows, look the same.
A long walk takes me to the Arrols’ abandoned summer apartment. It is half-submerged in the sand. The door is open. Only the tops of the still sheet-covered pieces of furniture are visible. The fire is buried beneath the waves of sand; so is the bed.
I climb slowly back to the train deck and stand, looking out over the shimmering sands which surround the bridge. An empty bottle lies at my feet. I take it by the neck and throw it from the train deck. It curves, end over end, glinting in the sunlight, towards the sand.
A wind comes up later, screaming through the bridge; scouring me, flailing me. I hug myself in a corner, watching the edge of the wind strip paint from the bridge like some endless rasping tongue. ‘I give in,’ I tell it.
The sand seems to fill my brain. My skull feels like the bottom of an hourglass.
‘I give in. I don’t know. Thing or place; you tell me.’ I think this is my own voice. The wind blows harder.
I cannot hear myself speak, but I know what I am trying to say. I am suddenly certain that death has a sound; a word which anybody may utter which will cause and be their death. I am trying to think of this word when something grates and swivels in the distance, and hands lift me away from this place.
